Intel Shows 14nm Broadwell Consuming 30% Less Power Than 22nm Haswell

As expected, IDF13’s day two keynote was mostly about Bay Trail and Intel’s continued push into thinner, lighter, and smaller, mobile devices. The keynote was handled by a trio of execs, Douglas Fisher, Vice President and General Manager of Intel’s Software and Services Group. Herman Eul, Corporate Vice President and General Manager of the Communication group. And Kirk Skaugen, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the PC Client Group. Douglas talked about how Intel is optimizing services to expand the ecosystems surrounding mobile devices, Herman ran some fun demos featuring Intel-powered devices. And Kirk talked about the constant evolution of the PC and demoed a number of devices of various form factors, which all featured Intel tech inside.

Herman Eul used a Bay Trail-powered tablet to turn the audience into a virtual display, using multi-color, LED-equipped bracelets.

In addition to showing off a number of devices on his own, Kirk Skaugen enlisted the help of some actors, Intel employees, and guest speakers as well during his portion of the keynote. During Kirk’s talk, Asus CEO Jerry Shen was brought on stage to unveil the company’s upcoming Bay Trail-based 2-in-1 device, the T100. The T100 sports a quad-core Bay Trail SoC and reportedly offers up to 11 hours of battery life. Additional features of the machine include a high-resolution IPS display, stereo speakers, and a detachable keyboard dock. Other details weren’t mentioned on stage, but we’ve got all of the other pertinent specs and info (along with some hi-res images) posted here. Neil Hand, VP of Tablets and Performance PCs at Dell also came out to quickly show an upcoming Dell 8” tablet that will be part of the revived Venue family of products.

While on stage, Mr. Skaugen also snuck in some additional information about Broadwell, the 14nm follow up to Haswell that was mentioned during Brian Krzanich’s opening day keynote. In a quick demo, Kirk showed a couple of systems running the Cinebench multi-threaded benchmark side-by-side. One of the systems featured a Haswell-Y processor, the other a Broadwell-Y. The benchmark results weren’t revealed, but during the Cinebench run, power was being monitored on both systems and it showed the Broadwell-Y rig consuming roughly 30% less power than Haswell-Y.

The on-stage demo at IDF13 showed Broadwell-Y consuming less power than Haswell-Y, under both idle and load conditions.

Without knowing clocks and performance levels, we can’t draw many conclusion from the power numbers shown, but they do hint at Broadwell-Y’s relative health, even at this early stage of the game.